Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
He's made a career of railing against corporate misdeeds. Yet he himself has abused his underlings, betrayed close friends and ruled his public-interest empire like a dictator.
Jul 1, 2004 | Ralph Nader spent his 70th birthday with Bill Maher on his HBO show "Real Time," where Maher pressed him on exactly what his controversial fourth presidential campaign will contribute to the national debate. Nader repeated once again that he's the only candidate not beholden to "corporate America."
While Nader's legacy as a consumer advocate is unparalleled, it is worth noting that the onetime national hero wasn't celebrating his landmark birthday surrounded by the hundreds of people he has worked with and influenced over four decades. Indeed, virtually no one who worked with him since the heady days of Nader's Raiders is supporting him politically or personally today. He has inspired almost no loyalty and instead has alienated many of his closest associates. The estrangement between Nader and many of his former intimates is not a new phenomenon; it's not the result of his ruinous campaign for president in 2000; it dates back to his earliest days as a public figure.
Dozens of people who have worked with or for Nader over the decades have had bitter ruptures with the man they once respected and admired. The level of acrimony is so widespread and acute that it's impossible to dismiss those involved as disgruntled former employees, disillusioned leftists or self-seeking turncoats. Usually it was Nader himself who ratcheted up what was often just a parting of ways into professional warfare and vitriolic personal attacks.
While Nader continues to campaign against corporate abuse, his own record, according to many of those who have worked closely with him, is characterized by arrogance, underhanded attacks on friends and associates, secrecy, paranoia and mean-spiritedness -- even at the expense of his own causes. If he were a corporate CEO, subject to the laws governing publicly held and federally regulated firms, there can be little doubt he would have been removed long ago by his company's board of directors.
Nick Jacobs' blood boils every time he sees another poll showing Nader within striking distance of costing John Kerry the election. For him, it isn't just that Nader was indispensable in President Bush's 2000 victory over Al Gore. Nader's latest run for president is infuriating for personal reasons as well.
"He puts himself out there as pure as the driven snow, and he's not," says Jacobs. "He's paranoid, secretive and manipulative, at best. It galls me that he talks about how corrupt the two-party system is when he trashed someone to the FBI who was his best friend."
That someone was Jacobs' father, Theodore Jacobs. Ted Jacobs met Nader when they were both freshmen at Princeton and then attended Harvard Law School together. Later, as an attorney in private practice, Ted provided personal and professional legal assistance to his old college friend after he was catapulted to national prominence over the issue of automobile safety with the publication of "Unsafe at Any Speed." Ted became, in effect, Nader's chief of staff. And from 1970 to 1975, Ted was executive director of the Center for Study of Responsive Law, the first organization Nader founded.
The two men's ugly and painful falling out -- in which Nader trashed Jacobs to the FBI when Jacobs was up for a federal job and Jacobs retaliated with an explosive affidavit alleging financial and legal improprieties by Nader -- was the first of many destructive breaches between Nader and onetime allies. The story hasn't been told before, but the Jacobs family recently made private papers available to Salon that document the sad split.
"My dad kept everything," said Jacobs. "He had boxes of papers in our basement. They pretty much sat there until Nader announced that he was going to run again, and I decided to go through them." Nick was shocked by his discovery of this dark chapter in his father's otherwise enemy-free life.
In various articles from the early 1970s, Ted Jacobs was described as "Nader's closest friend and advisor" and the person who stood "between Nader and the world, absorbing the fury of the attacked, offering solace to the ignored, always speaking the absolute truth within the limits of what he believes Nader would wish him to reveal." But, according to the private papers shared with Salon, he informed Nader sometime in 1974 that he planned to leave the Center for the Study of Responsive Law but would first finish several projects.
On March 8, 1975, Jacobs arrived at the office to find the contents of two large file cabinets missing (including his personal diaries and documents relating to "financial matters") and his desk drawers ransacked. Nader arrived at the office a short while later to tell him he had ordered the files removed. In a state of near shock, Jacobs tendered his resignation and demanded to know what was going on. According to contemporaneous notes written by Jacobs, Nader said he had confiscated the files because a year earlier, Jacobs had signed checks for magazine subscriptions without Nader's permission. Nader also accused Jacobs of writing a check to himself for about $75 for expenses. Dismayed and shaken, Jacobs searched for a new job.
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